Sony Mobile no longer exists in Australia due to flagging sales — they pulled out earlier this year. Very quietly. It took a fair bit of investigation and sleuthing by our Managing Editor, Chris, to unearth what had happened. Today Sony have released worldwide sales figures for FY2018 and Q1 2019 and they aren’t great to say the least.
Via XperiaBlog we have seen the FY2018 Consolidated Financial Results for the Sony Corporation and it shows that they sold fewer smartphones than ever during the year and sales are forecast to drop even further this coming financial year. It is no surprise to us of course given their retreat from the Australian market, the closing of factories and removing their presence from regions throughout the world.
In the 2018 financial year Sony sold just 6.5 million smartphones — that is just 51.85% of what they sold in the previous financial year at 13.5 million smartphones. The result was that their revenue dropped a substantial 31%, 225.7 billion JPY from the previous year. Sony is doing nothing to prevent this slide it seems, switching factories from China to Thailand and laying off thousands of employees.
Sony have also revealed that their Q1 2019 sales were a record low 1.1 billion with the yearly total at this stage forecast set at 5 million but we think they would be extremely lucky to get anywhere near that with their graph trending in entirely the wrong direction.
The rest of Sony seems to be doing quite well so it is no surprise that they are slowly jettisoning their mobile division. We will have to wait and see if the mobile division survive much longer but with many companies focusing on gaming phones now you would have to think that Sony should have an in there. The PS5 is set to blow sales records out of the water and if they could get a true high end gaming phone to tie in well with that they could be on a winner.
Anyone else here sad that Sony Mobile seem to be heading the way of the dodo? Is a gaming phone the way out of it for them or should they stick to their home entertainment and home gaming products?
Would love for Google to buy the Sony Mobile division.
The last Sony flagship model to me was the XZ Premium , they mostly seemed to go down hill after that.
Even their latest phone offering while ok looks like a bit of trend follower and nothing out of the ordinary Sadly , hard to see Sony making much head way with the current offerings.
Less competition now and there phones used to interest me years ago. So in that respect yes, sad to see Sony maybe leaving phones. However, not really sad at the same time. If they don’t offer anything of interest what’s there to be sad about haha